Excerpt from The Economist -- "A recent paper* by Uma Karmarkar of Harvard Business School and Bryan Bollinger of Duke Fuqua School of Business finds that shoppers who bring their own bags when they buy groceries like to reward themselves for it. For two years the authors tracked transactions at a supermarket in America. Perhaps unsurprisingly, shoppers who brought their own bags bought more green products than those who used the store’s bags. But the eco-shoppers were also more likely to buy sweets, ice cream and crisps."

NYU Stern announced that Peter Henry, an economist and dean of the School, was awarded the Foreign Policy Association Medal at the organization’s annual Financial Services Dinner, held last evening at the Pierre Hotel in New York City.

Excerpt from HuffPost Live -- "I do think that there are some merits to allowing states to have a say in directing the flow of immigration because they understand local costs imposed by immigrants... and also the benefits. I think one advantage that the state-based visa would have, for example, over an employment-based visa is that the immigrants themselves would have more flexibility within the states. So they'd be able to work for any number of different employers. That would create a thicker labor market, which would, of course, benefit employers as well. So there would be a higher potential for good matches between employers and workers. In the existing system, if you take, for example, the H1B specialty employment visa, it ties a worker to one employer. So you don't have that kind of labor market flexibility, which is ultimately detrimental to the immigrant and the economy and the labor market."

Excerpt from Financial Times -- "'Something of this magnitude is rather unusual,' said Joshua Ronen, professor of accounting at New York University Stern School of Business and co-editor of the Journal of Law, Finance and Accounting."

Excerpt from The Guardian -- "In contrast, the Fair Labor Association launched its code alongside its charter. 'We realized we couldn’t just launch a set of principles,' Michael Posner, a former US assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor and head of New York University’s Center for Business and Human Rights, told me. 'It couldn’t just be that every company was "on a journey"; we needed metrics and ways to evaluate compliance.'"

Excerpt from BusinessBecause -- "Students on Stern’s master in business analytics program, which filled its class of 60 and closed the admissions process a month early, also 'get their hands dirty' with programming language. 'We are teaching the managers [and] executives who need to understand the language of analytics and how to leverage data to make strategic decisions,' said Roy Lee, Stern's assistant dean of global degree programs, in an interview with BusinessBecause."

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "Nicholas Economides, an economics professor at New York University, says paid prioritization would let ISPs pick the Internet’s winners, which would naturally be the richest players. 'In an industry with lots of change and innovation, there are big dangers of allowing only the people who can pay you today to win,' he said."

Excerpt from Luxury Daily -- "'Not all brands need be patrons of the arts but luxury brands most often are,' said Thomaï Serdari, Ph.D. brand strategist and adjunct professor of marketing at New York University, New York. 'Traditionally, luxury objects have been items of great craftsmanship and artistic intent, often made of the most precious and rare materials — in fact, most of the luxury objects produced in pre-modern times are housed in renowned museum collections today.'"

The NYU Stern Berkley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation will welcome alumni, angel investors, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and industry innovators to the 2015 New Venture Showcase and Reception on February 25.

Excerpt from Forbes -- "The Harvard Business School Case, El Bulli: A Taste of Innovation, provides business lessons from the way Ferran Adria innovates (the Catalan chef, thought by many to be the most creative chef in history) and it truly changed my life. Ferran’s methods inspired both my book, Catalyzing Innovation and innovation program for global executives, Inventours™, and it made me far more observant of how others innovate across industries, wherever I go. Given how much I learned by studying Ferran, I thought learning how the best 'mixologists' innovate could yield similar insights, given the art and entertainment form inventive craft cocktails have become."

Excerpt from CKGSB Knowledge -- "[Economides's] models suggest that even small network effects can help a good company realize high profits, more sales and greater profits, and the stronger the effect, the more likely that the company will be able to achieve a monopoly position. 'If we have a network, we will see a lot of inequality among companies, which means that some people are going to make a lot of money,' he says."

Excerpt from BusinessBecause -- "Offered jointly by Stern and NYU’s law school, the course covered topics such as bitcoin as an investment and the trading of bitcoin, and the legal and regulatory treatment of the currency. It ran from September to December 2014. 'We are exploring a new technology that raises interesting questions about the nature of money and how that is likely to change in the future,' said David Yermack, a finance professor at Stern who created the course with law school professor Geoff Miller."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "It's a great time to be a writer, someone who's trying to greenlight a script. There's going to be more original scripted series this year than, I think, in the history of television. It's just not a great time to be in the business of selling eyeballs on an ad-supported model. HBO, great business. Netflix, great business. Amazon media might be a great business. Trying to get a ton of people to show up and then selling commercials to beer companies, that's going to be a difficult business."

Excerpt from WIRED -- "'Having a greater business in Ireland would certainly help Apple make a case to the European Commission that a larger fraction of their operations are based in the country in which they have this tax deal,' says Arun Sundararajan, professor of information, operations, and management sciences at NYU’s Stern School of Business."

Excerpt from Poets & Quants -- "Advanced Professional Certificate students are to take 15 units, a quarter of the number required for an MBA, on a part-time basis, in MBA classes that have capacity. Each student will follow one of three tracks: finance, marketing, or general business. 'The finance track could quickly empower people who didn’t major in finance in college, but who now work in the industry, with a broader perspective that helps them excel in their function,' says Isser Gallogly, assistant dean of MBA admissions. 'Liberal arts majors can combine the fundamentals of marketing with the latest thinking in analytics and digital through the marketing track. Entrepreneurs without a business degree can customize the handful of business courses they want to take in the general business track. Others with an MBA may want to delve into a new area of interest.'"

NYU Stern Professor and Nobel Laureate Robert Engle delivered the inaugural “Gallatin Lecture Series on Banking,” the first in a series of four lectures jointly hosted by NYU Stern and The Clearing House.

Working professionals who want to build knowledge quickly in a specific area to refresh or supplement their expertise can now apply to take graduate-level courses at NYU Stern through new non-degree Advanced Professional Certificate (APC) programs.

Excerpt from Poets & Quants -- "This past week, New York University’s Stern School of Business announced a new scholarship program. It will give 10 low-income undergraduate students the opportunity to attend Stern without incurring the burden of debt for the next four years. Alumnus Leonard R. Stern has donated $5.75 million to fund the new Leonard R. Stern New York City scholarship program aimed at high-achieving low income high school students in the city."

Excerpt from Bankrate.com -- "'Safety and soundness is probably improving because banks are being increasingly required to do less risky things,' says Smith, but many of the regulatory changes made to accomplish that could end up actually harming the ability of major banks to survive over the long term."